I've always been very conflicted about the whole motherhood thing. I was indoctrinated to think about college and a career--and to avoid men and having children at all costs. I was told, "When you go to college..." Whereas my brothers were told, "When you get married..." I'm not sure if this stems from the fact that my mother was going to community college and had just been accepted to Pepperdine and UCLA (she hadn't decided where she wanted to go) when she married my dad at 21 at the end of the fall semester--and she never transferred to university. She became a housewife, and then four years of marriage later, she had me. The marriage ended in divorce after 15 years--15 years of being a housewife and mother left her with very few job prospects.

While growing up I was told that I couldn't trust anyone, not even her. I was told that I should never rely on anybody to do something that I can do myself, or teach myself how to do. I wasn't told that I shouldn't get married per se, but it never--not once--came up in conversation or was hinted at, and in fact it was implied that marriage was a prison. And finally I learned how children are burdens, and if I hadn't been born, maybe she would have went back to school, maybe she would have left my father sooner, maybe she would've had a better life without me. These musings were were always followed up by, "But I never regret having you." I bought it at first. But after years and years of hearing how much better my mother's life could have been without me, it was hard to believe her.

B has shown me what marriage can be like--and how joyful it can be. Some days I am amazed that we have survived so much together: 9/11, snipers, crappy jobs, death threats, bed bugs, living from paycheck to paycheck, moving across the country multiple times, unemployment, being without friends and family--and I can truly say that I love him more today than I did the day we got married. It's in these moments when I'm sorry that my mother has never experienced this kind of closeness and trueness of love for someone (other than her children).

It is for these reasons that my inner conflict becomes extremely muddled. Because if B has been able to show me love unlike anything I could have imagined and has effectively broken down every preconceived notion I had about men, husbands, and the institution of marriage, then does that mean that my preconceived notions about children and parenthood are potentially wrong?

Because of my upbringing, and indoctrination, I thought it was impossible to have children and a career. I'm not just talking about a job, but a career. My mom slaughtered rabbits for five bucks an hour, that was a job. I'm trying to get my Ph.D. and eventually want to be a professor and writer, that would be a career. These books, each in their own way, has helped illuminate this topic--because it's a topic that I can't really discuss in depth with anyone: my mother is supportive of whatever I decide, B doesn't really have an opinion one way or the other, I'm not close enough to the women with children (or who are currently pregnant) I know (and there are a lot out here in California) to interrogate them about the reasons they chose to have children or how they balance work and home, and my closest friends don't have or don't want children.

Due to this, I have been reading a lot of books lately about the decision to either have children or to not have children. I thought about separating the titles by category: motherhood and being childfree (or childless) by choice. But I thought that wouldn't be a fair representation on how these books have helped shaped notions in my head. Because I don't think motherhood and CFBC as necessarily two different categories like black and white anymore.

So the books I've been reading lately have been:

• How She Really Does it: Secrets of Stay-At-Work Moms


• Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety


• The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women


• Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood


• I'm Okay, You're a Brat!: Setting Priorities Straight and Freeing You From the Guilt and Mad Myths of Parenthood


• Unwomanly Conduct


• Families of Two


• Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything and Why We Pretend It Doesn't


• The Childless Revolution: What It Means to Be Childless Today

What you'll notice from my compiled list is that I most interested in how the media and the people in our lives create and shape the perceptions around the decision to parent or not. Furthermore, there are so many myths about parenthood, that I don't want to make a choice (in either direction) based on assumptions or indoctrinations.

I'm also interested in how these perceptions effect work performance and home life. I find this fascinating because I see so many assumptions in advertising or entertainment that link womanhood with motherhood, and yet this link is not made between manhood and fatherhood.

For instance, this is a post from a CFBC forum that I lurk upon that illustrated this dichotomy in real life.

A couple of days ago, I sat in on an interview panel for a position we are trying to fill. Company policy is that at least 3 people have to be on the panel. The questions for the interview are written up beforehand, and each panel member gets a copy. The applicants are graded on a scale of 1-4 for each question by each panelist.

One of the questions is "Describe 2 of your greatest accomplishments of the last year and how you achieved them." We interviewed 2 women and one man. Both women said having a baby or raising a child for the answer to one of their accomplishments. The man didn't have children. However, I've sat in on several interviews and women have often mentioned their children as an accomplishment. None of the men have ever claimed fatherhood as one of their accomplishments.

I wonder why that is? Is it an accomplishment for women but not for men? Weird.

This made me wonder, as an interviewer, how would I respond if someone said that their proudest accomplishment was deciding not to have children and that they recently had a vasectomy or tubal ligation?

Along this line, it makes me wonder why it's acceptable to say that having children is an accomplishment. A poster responded to the above by saying that having children is the kind of home/personal accomplishment that people aren't really looking for in the workplace, and so it's ultimately inappropriate, and what would that suggest about the employee's priorities?

My initial response is to think that either response (having children or vasectomy/tubal ligation=proudest accomplishment) would be unacceptable to such an interview question. I think that is largely because I am proud of so many things that I have accomplished in my life (or to be specific to the interview question, the past year) that I wonder how could having children or a tubal ligation even possibly come close to a personal point of achievement? It's not rocket science to get knocked up or be cut open by a doctor. Even though I try to support whatever lifestyle people choose, I think both answers fall into the TMI category, and I'd be left to wonder what would provoke someone to divulge such information in an interview to strangers. Sure, either one is a great accomplishment when considering hard decisions we all must make in life--but why should I be applauding someone's personal choice in the workplace?

On the other hand, and this is where my booklist comes into play, I have started to wonder if perhaps I am also indoctrinated by society to believe that the home and the workplace should be kept separate.

The most common problem working mothers face when having children is that their priorities change, and they usually want to be home on time, as opposed to 50-70 hours elsewhere. However, I don't think this dilemma is relegated simply to Stay-At-Work Moms. After I was laid off from Aero Film, I never applied for another job in the film industry because I saw that I would have to give up my personal life if I wanted to get into production. I may have hated being a receptionist/office manager, but I damn well made sure that I left at 6 p.m. every day--because I could have stayed until 7 or 8 o'clock at night on a regular basis; I wouldn't have been monetarily compensated for those hours, but I would have made a "good impression" and perhaps weaseled my way into production. But turns out that working 18 hour days, 7 days a week, for three months straight is not my idea of a good time.

I believe that men, women, parents, non-parents usually don't get enough support at work anyway--and by support I guess I'm really talking about flexibility, which is something I think everyone universally longs for. I still think film production would be so much fun--but I am unwilling to trade my personal life for that career. What would a business look like if it valued employees as people instead of workers, and structured its company to be more flexible? Have employees work five or six hour work days, or eight to twelve hour days 3 or 4 days a week? Would that inherently change the structure of our attitudes about the separation of work and home? Is it necessary to have that separation?

I think most of us labor in life to make sure work doesn't bleed over into life. Life is what we do at home, on our own time. Work is what we do in order to afford life. The potential problem with asking the workplace to consider our home lives is that they may feel they own, or are entitled to, some aspect of our home life. I doubt many of us would expect an employer to consider us as whole persons whose life sometimes interferes with work, without expecting that they would also want work to bleed into home life. So how can the flexibility be achieved?

The answer to that question may be to work for yourself. Freelance or start a business. Although, I bet both freelancers and entrepreneurs would argue that when you're working for yourself, you usually have to work twice as hard. But according to How She Really Does it: Secrets of Stay-At-Work Moms the way flexibility generally is achieved is by striking out on your own.

The reason why I am so interested in this topic is because it is pretty much the only point of contention B and I have about logistically having children in the future: our careers. What would happen to them? B doesn't worry about this as much as I do, and I can't help but wonder if it's because he hasn't been taught that his identity as a man is tied up with fatherhood. And although I can say that I wasn't taught by my parents that my identity was linked to motherhood, society suggests otherwise.

I realize that I my childhood indoctrinated me to value work over children (ironic, no?), but I still consider my education and the career I hope to achieve as an integral part of my identity. My mom was a Stay-At-Home Mom, B's mom was a Stay-At-Work Mom, and each of us think that our childhood was pretty swell, and wouldn't mind duplicating our experiences. However, I know that I can not relinquish my identity to be a parent, and I wouldn't want to force B into that position either.

Looking back, I really appreciated my mother being home when I got back from school, helping me with homework, making dinner and Halloween costumes, and I think I grew to be the person I am today because my mom was around. However, just because B's mom worked, doesn't mean he didn't get those things. His mom turned him into Link one year that rivals my Rainbow Brite. But whereas B's mom did have help in the form of a nanny/housekeeper--she knew the woman and was friends with the woman before that, so she was really comfortable with the person looking after her children. If B and I were ever to have children, there would be no other option other than to use daycare. This is not to suggest that daycare is a lesser option, and in fact I have read studies (from I'm Okay, You're a Brat!: Setting Priorities Straight and Freeing You From the Guilt and Mad Myths of Parenthood) that demonstrate that children who participate in daycare develop social skills more quickly and more easily adapt to social situations. Those findings are consistent with my own experience; I remember the first day of school--I was six years old and I had essentially never been without my mother--and I cried my eyes out. And it wasn't quietly sobbing to myself at a desk, I mean I was loud. It embarasses me to admit, but it's true. It's also true that I would be uncomfortable with the high turnover rate that daycares generally experience, because I wouldn't be able to research or maintain updated knowledge on the employees.

So can work and home really coexist? As a grad student, Assistant Lecturer and writer, I really have no choice but to "take my work home with me." There ain't no way that I'd be gradin' papers in my tiny office for 20 hours on top of all the time I'm already on campus. Maybe, in the end, it's all a matter of industry and career-choice.

I suppose it's a balance, like everything else.

Labels: cfbc, childfree by choice, childhood, children, grad school, memories, parenthood, parents, real life, the children question, uncomfortable questions, women

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So here are the nation's most and least affordable housing markets as of the second quarter of 2005. These rankings are based on the median home sales price compared with median household income.

I know it's a little irrational of me, but I feel offended that 18 out of 19 Least Affordable places to live is a city in California. It might be because places like Anaheim, Modesto, Stockton, Riverside, Oakland, Fresno and especially Yuba City used to be the buttcracks of California. So what business do they have being on this Least Affordable Places to Live list? Who would want to live in those cities anyway? I had friends in Yuba City that did nothing but try to get out of that shower drain of a town. I remember back in 1997 during El Nino, a leavey broke and flooded Yuba City. I had a friend who had no choice but to live in the local high school as it was converted as a shelter. Furthermore, those cities used to be places that you held your breath as you drove though in hopes that your car didn't break down in Fresno. And sure Riverside has a UC school, but I had relatives in Riverside: they were hard-core drug addicts. Believe me, you don't wanna get stuck there.

So back to why I feel offended: is it because out of all the places in the country we could have moved to, I'm the one who chose California? B was definitely fine with this decision, and supported this choice, and even was excited about it. But we could have moved to a town in his home state Lansing, Saginaw, Detroit, Grand Rapids or Flint instead.

I know it's irrational to feel offended. I know why we moved here. We looked for jobs in both states, and California's job opportunities couldn't be paralleled. Sure Michigan might have five of the Most Affordable Places to Live, but I wonder what kind of life we'd be living if we had gone there instead. At least here, we're making money for the first time in our lives. But I do admit how disappointing it is to see that one-bedroom apartments selling for half-a-million-dollars+ in our immediate neighborhood. Even though we're making good money now, we can't really afford to buy a home here.

Labels: california, Michigan, real estate

( 1comments )

at March 22, 2006 9:49 PM  Ish said...

Its a terrible time to be in Michigan, and especially looking for a job in Michigan (though you'd meet a lot of people to have that in common with).

Ultimately you get what you pay for and the reason its so expensive out there is because of all the opportunities. I say you're better off. Me, I'm getting a job where it doesn't matter where I live, so I'll live somewhere cheap.

 

So it might be interesting to read: The Torn-Up Credit Card Application but it sure does piss me off.

We used to faithfully shred those offers, but we have a rather small shredder that is just too annoying to clean out after a week of shredding all the freakin' credit card applications. We stopped about a year ago when we moved to California because there was now a garbage conveniently located near our mailbox. But here's a better solution. If you just want to stop the applications at their source, then here: Opt-Out Screen will take your name off the big credit source companies. If you choose the 5 year opt-out plan, then you don't even need to mail it in, it can be completed online.

Labels: news

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I did not apply to the scholarship for the writing workshop in New York. I decided it was too expensive for two weeks. How insane would it be to try to arrange for a writing workshop week that would be free to participants at USC this summer? Would I be able to get any professors or writers to, well, work for free for a day or two?

I still wonder if maybe I should have applied for the scholarship. I mean, I don't regret not applying because even with the scholarship, it still would have cost me like a $1000 just for the plane ticket and the room/board. And I'd rather save up the money we have in our vacation fund and use it to do something with B as opposed to doing something without B.

I'd love to go to The Royal Shakespeare's Company Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-on-Avon this year. Ian McKellan is going to be King Lear and Patrick Stewart is going to be Prospero and Antony! Plus there's going to be a weird version of Hamlet featuring tiny ninja figures, and Ophelia will drown in a glass of water, put on by the Tiny Ninja Theater of NYC.

If I had known that my fifty-cent figurines could do Shakespeare, then I would have employed my Homies ages ago.

And if I haven't posted this website on my blog before, then I'm posting it now.

Labels: grad school, travel

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"Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid" (12:1).

"Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell" (23:13-14).

"Like a golden ring in a swine's snout is a beautiful woman with a rebellious disposition" (11:22).

"It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop, than with a quarellsome woman and in a wide house" (25:24).

Sometimes the Bible is great for the entertainment value.

Labels: books, writing

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There's a Coldstone Creamery getting built across the street.

We are gonna get so faaaaaat.

Labels: los angeles

( 3comments )

at March 9, 2006 6:02 PM  Alex_Knight said...

Gah. You suck. I have to like drive to Novi or Lansing for one. :-P

 

at March 10, 2006 3:26 PM  Anonymous said...

I've been to one, and to a similar place called Maggie Moo's. I enjoy ice cream to an extent that is probably morbid, but I didn't find anything particularly enthralling about the Coldstone style setup. It was good, yeah, but not astoundingly better or worse than any other ice cream parlor, in my opinion.

Thus, in the words of the often apathetic man who posted before me: "Meh."

-El Hombre

 

at March 11, 2006 11:17 AM  Samantha said...

I've been to that Maggie Moo's place once and I didn't particularly care for it. It was like Baskin Robbin's but with a different name.

For me, it's Coldstone. I'm a big texture person, so I think it's the creaminess of the ice cream that is achieved with the mixing.

B and I just bought our own little Coldstone set on Amazon for for like $14 recently. We keep the spades and the marble slab frozen, and then we use those to carve out the ice cream and to mix in the pieces of Heath bar or graham cracker in. I've been happy with the level of yumminess we have achieved. So perhaps I'll finally venture away from the Coffee Lover's recipe at Coldstone, since I can make it at home, and try something new for a change.

 

Note the dazed look in her eyes. One is halfway slit open, the other is mostly closed. If she were human, there'd definitely be sleep creases on her face. You don't know, but her tail was thumping like a slow heartbeat, too.

My husband and Zhoul have this uncanny ability to make anything look comfortable. I'm so jealous.

Labels: cat

( 2comments )

at March 13, 2006 11:00 PM  Anonymous said...

Evil dictator cat!!!!!!

 

at March 16, 2006 1:54 PM  Samantha said...

I know who you are!

 

This snippet taken from an article called:Awful is the New Awesome.

"Crash": Kids, racism is really really really bad and wrong. Look, just watch this heavy, important movie about how everyone who lives in Los Angeles — all 12 of them — is super racist and awful. There. Did you watch it and pay very close attention? Good. Do you now understand the message? Because if you don't then you're going to have to watch it again. With Oprah. She thinks it's as good as "Citizen Kane." She said so on her show.Why you should see it anyway: Because it's really funny when Hollywood decides to tackle a serious moral issue and throw star-powered weight behind something that everyone but Neo-Nazis agrees on already. To ice the Let's Pat Ourselves on The Back Cake, they'll probably give it Oscar too. I know the scene where Racism pushes Sandra Bullock down a flight of stairs deserves some kind of award.

And that dumb movie won best picture.

I feel dirty to be living in L.A.

Labels: los angeles, movies, news

( 1comments )

at March 5, 2006 10:58 PM  Lorie said...

I have to admit, I still want to rent the movie someday, perhaps partly because of all the conflicting things I've read about it. Or maybe I just want to see Racism push Sandra Bullock down a flight of stairs.

 

You know how when you have a dream, and then you achieve that dream, it can suddenly become a terrifying experience because now it's like, "Uh. Now what?"
I am kind of feeling like that right now.

I've been working on my novel ever since last semester, and nothing I do seems right. It's not that it gets bad reviews at workshop or anything, but it's like I don't know what the crap I'm doing. I don't know how to write a novel. I don't know how to structure a novel. I keep changing it and revising it and it keeps sucking.

I used to feel such a pressure to be brilliant, but I've sort of given myself the freedom to write crap this term, and apparently I am incapable of anything else.

But that's just my fiction experience.

My poetry workshop/song writing collaboration is going much more smoothly. Actually, it appears that I'm not too shabby at the whole poem writing business. Which is interesting because I tend to think all my poetry sucks. However, my favorite living poet has frequently complimented my work and said how glad he was that I was in the class (I'm the only fiction writer masquerading as a poet this term).

Which is not to suggest that my fiction does not suck. I am not trying to be modest here (see praises from David St. John above). It actually sucks. I bet if I plugged my fiction writing into the wall, it would vacuum better than our sucky vacuum.

I honestly don't know what to do here. My novel just doesn't seem to be working, but every other idea I try, I end up hating after a page and losing all motivation.

I got nominated for The New York State Summer Writers Institute Scholarship today. I have to confess two things: 1) Obviously, I have never attended one of these things and 2) I've heard that these events can end up being a weird sort of writer orgy where people are just trying to get in each other's pants the entire time, and the writing isn't really focused on. Needless to say, I wouldn't really want to endure that kind of atmosphere, being happily married and sexually satisfied at home.

Even if I got the scholarship, I'd be gone anywhere from 2 weeks to a month (during July, so I'd be missing our birthdays, and by our I am referring to B's birthday and mine). And it'd still cost approximately $276 in roundtrip airfare. Then $630 for room and board for 2 weeks ($1260 for a month). If I stayed for a month, I could get college credit, but then I'd have to pay an additional $350. Although I wouldn't have to pay the cost of the tuition (which runs anywhere from $1000-$2000).

I don't know if it'd be worth it to be 3000 miles away from the person I love most in the world just to be neurotic and self-conscious about my writing in the Eastern Standard Time Zone.

Labels: grad school, los angeles, travel, writing

( 2comments )

at March 2, 2006 2:34 PM  Anonymous said...

You would, in fact, have the unparalleled opportunity to be neurotic and self-conscious about your writing in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone.

This is not to suggest that the Eastern Standard Time Zone doesn't suck. It sucks massively. If you placed the Eastern Standard Time Zone next to a black hole, it would suck the black hole inside out. I was merely pointing out that it sucks one full hour ahead of the time in which it currently sucks.

 

at March 2, 2006 3:05 PM  Lorie said...

Is this a workshop that carries some sort of prestige that would look good on a resume (or C.V. or whatever it's called in academia)? Otherwise, it sounds like if you're looking for a workshop/retreat experience, you'd be better off shopping around some more before committing to one.